This blog post is part of our blogging series which shows new users and newbies how to setup and manage an online blog using WordPress. We’ve written a lot on this topic and if you wish to read more on blogging, use the search box to search for more blogging tips.
Today’s post is about redirecting your WordPress feeds to FeedBurner when using Nginx web server.
If you’ve been following this blog, then you probably already know that we’ve switched to Nginx web server from Apache. We’ve also written a lot about our experiences switching to Nginx. To read some of our posts on switching to Nginx from Apache, use the search box to search for topics on that.
Redirecting your WordPress feeds to FeedBurner isn’t something that everyone should do. In fact, some folks are switching to other feed providers away from FeedBurner. I am sticking with FeedBurner because it’s still useful.
FeedBurner is an external service owned by Google that is sometimes preferred for serving feeds as it has detailed statistics and other sharing features. When you want to know who are subscribing to your feeds, how many users and what are they using to subscribe, use services like FeedBurner and others.
There are many plugins that will help you automatically redirect your WordPress feeds to FeedBurner. But if you’re like me who doesn’t like installing and enabling too many plugins in WordPress, then you’ll want to let your web server handle the redirects.
It’s easy to configure and this post is about to show you.
The first thing you’ll want to do is to sign up for an account at feedburner.google.com. After creating and enabling some account features, get your FeedBurner address.
Next, connect to your Nginx web server config file (default.conf) file and add this code to the main server block.
if ($http_user_agent !~ FeedBurner) {rewrite ^/feed/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/liberiangeek last;}
Save the file and you’re done.
Also, make sure to verify that your FeedBurner address matches the Nginx redirect. The next time your users want to access your feed, they will be redirected to FeedBurner. Another advantage of using FeedBurner to server your feed is that, FeedBurner will take some of the load of serving your feeds from your web server and may improve its performance.
Enjoy!